


Nameless One

by KitsJay



Category: A-Team (2010)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mental Illness, a-team kinkmeme, attempted suicide, bipolar
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:28:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 17,173
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KitsJay/pseuds/KitsJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of the chaos, there sometimes comes a brief breath of calm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title taken from James Clarence Mangan's poem, ["Nameless One".](http://www.bartleby.com/101/665.html)

When he was nineteen, Face thought things were finally going right for him. The famous Hannibal Smith had practically adopted him, dragging him into his unit, introducing him to a team, to a family, and all he had to do was not screw it up.

Which was easier said than done, when one night he felt like his skin was two sizes too small, like he had to move or something was going to go wrong and he had no idea what. A lot easier, when he went for a run to burn off some of that restless energy he could feel crawling in him and heard the moon singing to him.

You get one shot at this, Hannibal Smith had told him when he brought him in. One chance.

Last chance, he had heard. 

Don’t screw this up, Face told himself fiercely, feeling his mind spread in a million different directions, trying to follow them all at once and getting tangled up in the process and when it felt like he couldn’t hold on anymore, that he was going to crawl out of his skin and burst into a sunburst of colors like light through a prism, he just kept repeating “last chance” like a mantra until finally he collapsed onto his cot.

The whispers and the coppery lightning in his veins were gone the next morning, but it was the first time he knew something was really wrong.

It was not the first time that he knew he had to smile and fake it ‘til you make it, baby, because a last chance was the best he was going to get.


	2. Chapter One

His next leave, he finds a psychiatrist two hours away and makes an appointment under a false name. They have psychiatrists on camp, but all of them would have to report him to his commander if they even got a whiff of something bad going down (and there is a lot of bad in whatever this is, he thinks), so screw that. 

The bad spell had mostly dissipated, but he feels antsy and jittery and wants to prowl around the tiny room stuffed with bookshelves and generated clutter of Dr. Mahtra’s office. Instead he forces himself to sit and wait for her to come in and reminds himself to answer all her questions honestly. He’s almost forgotten what the truth sounds like; it takes practice to remember how to say it again.

She’s not really what he was expecting; she’s cold and refuses to look up from her little notepad, which he thought he would appreciate until she starts saying “Bipolar I” and “mania” and “life turned upside down”, and okay, she may not actually have said that last one out loud, but she might as well have, and he wishes she would just look at him for once. 

“Excuse me?” he chokes out, because he always called them his “spells” and now they’re “episodes” and pretty soon his whole life is going to be a soap opera. 

She glances up and her face softens, like she finally noticed that there’s a real, live, currently freaking out human being in front of her. 

“It’s manageable,” she says, slipping him a prescription. “Lithium will put a ceiling, so you never feel _too_ good. You do need to start taking medication immediately though. Because you’re so young, it’s just going to get worse if you leave it untreated.”

She reels off some other things, and the entire time he stares at the little slip of paper, he’s just thinking of all the reasons why he can’t take it.

Weight gain—he can’t. His body gets him half the stuff on camp that Hannibal needs, how is he supposed to get it if he’s some fat blob?

Hand tremors—a marksman sniper with hand tremors, right, that’ll work.

Mind fog—because Hannibal’s plans weren’t complicated enough already.

He thanks her and stumbles out, making his way to the car and sitting there for a long time staring at the cement wall of the non-descript building. The prescription he carefully tears up into tiny little pieces and lets them flutter out the window as he drives down the road.

There’s a bookstore, and he stops because contrary to popular opinion on base, he _can_ read, thank you very much. He finds the self-help section, feeling out of place and embarrassed like he hasn’t for a very long time. There’s a row of books on bipolar, all in CAPITAL LETTERS like they want the whole world to see that you’re buying this and he fights down a ridiculous impulse to tell them to shush, other people will hear them. He shakes the thought free, grabs a few of them, and settles into a chair shoved into a forgotten corner of the store. 

After two hours, he throws the last one down. From what he skimmed, they all said the same things, nothing that could help. Change your diet, which was impossible unless the mess suddenly decided to start serving healthy fare instead of their usual slop; keep to a routine, which he was, kind of, except for those times he randomly got called out to a mission or Hannibal needed him for something, which was pretty much ninety percent of the time; get a full night’s sleep, yeah, good luck with that one in the Army Rangers, buddy.

In none of them does he find a guide to how to hide a serious mental illness from his superiors and not get shot because he was following the pretty butterflies into a combat zone. He should really write to the authors about that.

He orders a double-espresso drink from the coffee shop at the front of the bookstore; the books all told him that he should avoid caffeine, but fuck that. Something’s got to make this day a little bit better and if the barista won’t respond to his charms, at least espresso has never turned him down.

It occurs to him as he’s sipping at his drink and driving back to base, part of his brain already working on an excuse if the guys ask him where he was (a grin and a wink is more effective than any cover story he’s come up with), that he’s going about this entirely wrong. He’s Face. He’s the consummate con artist. He can sweet-talk his way into any locked room and come out as cool as ice in the middle of the fucking Sahara. If he can’t manage to con a doctor into giving him a few good drugs, then he might as well retire.

He had written some of the drugs they had talked about in the books on a scrap of paper—lithium was out, because there was no way he could get that without someone raising eyebrows, and the blood tests alone would catch him out, but there were some others. 

This could work, he tells himself. He would make it work.


	3. Chapter Two

The first doctor is easy. He wants to stop smoking, he says, tapping his fingers nervously on the arm of the chair, like he was fidgeting for something to be in his hands. He smacks his gum for extra emphasis. 

“I’ve tried the patch and it’s just not working, but I was talking to a buddy, y’know, and he said, um, Zy—Zy something? He said it worked like a charm for him.”

“Zyban?” the doctor says, smiling encouragingly. “It’s shown promising results for some people. We can certainly try it if you’re serious about quitting."

“Oh, I am,” he flashes her his patented grin, not even feeling a little guilty when she blushes like a schoolgirl. “I really am.”

 

The next one he scams Depakote from is a little bit harder, but it’s that extra challenge that gives him a rush.

“It’s these migraines,” he says sheepishly. A little bit of the truth, to sell the rest of the lie. “I can’t do my job with them. Is there any medicines to prevent them?” 

“We generally don’t like prescribing those… do you have any triggers?”

He shrugs. “It’s the MRE’s. Loaded with all kinds of shit, can’t exactly avoid them, right?”

The doctor nods sympathetically and writes him a prescription. “This should help. It’s an anti-seizure medication. It can help to prevent the onset of them, but it would help if you tried to avoid any triggers.”

“Thanks, doc. I’ll do my best, promise.”

Anti-anxiety meds and sleeping pills are practically OTC in camp, so he manages to get those with a few casual words and some favors here and there. If anyone had bothered looking in his kit, they would find a carefully arranged cocktail of meds that he has finagled carefully until he could breathe, until he felt more balanced than he had in a long time. It isn’t perfect, but it would do for now. 

Face was good at lying to people, but he had figured out a long time ago that the easiest person to lie to was himself.


	4. Chapter Three

If Hannibal noticed anything, he doesn’t say, just gives Face that even stare and asks questions like, “You okay, el-tee?” and Face sometimes wants to blurt out everything, tell him he’s not, that he doesn’t know what’s happening (except of course he does), that everything feels like it’s falling apart sometimes and even the haphazard mix of medications doesn’t help all the time—but instead he just smiles and says, “Perfect, Colonel”. 

And Hannibal will nod, but he doesn’t say anything when the nights get so bad that Face shakes in his bed, twisting the scratchy blankets in his hands because he needs something to hold onto. He doesn’t say anything when Face comes to him at the middle of the night and just sits beside his cot, watching him sleep, wanting to curl up beside him and someone to tell him it’ll be alright, because he’s a grown man for God’s sake, he shouldn’t need this. 

He doesn’t say anything the next morning when Face puts his game face on and pretends everything is fine. That the bags under his eyes are because he found some cute sergeant who blushed and giggled and let him kiss her behind the mess, and the other guys whoop and holler, slapping him on the back. 

Sometimes Face wishes he would, but a bigger part of him keeps reminding him how quickly this can all come crashing down around him and he’ll be trapped in the rubble.

 

The other guys filter out, some going home, others transferring and getting reluctant goodbyes from Hannibal and Face, until Face feels like he’s tap-dancing on quicksand. The only thing anchoring him anymore is Hannibal, his quiet, familiar presence telling him to steady on. Murdock and B.A. are a welcome addition to the team—B.A. for that same solidity as Hannibal, those broad shoulders always there to defend and protect and to lean on, even though Face will never take him up on it, just as he never took Hannibal’s big hands up on the promises they make to soothe him and bring him down when nights get bad. Murdock is the opposite. He wears his crazy on the patches of his beat-up bomber jacket and the brim of his baseball cap and the Chucks on his feet and when Face looks at him, he wonders if that same glint lives in his eyes.

Face doesn’t know what to make of him at first, so willing to let the world see all his problems, reveling in it, almost, and he wishes he could have that confidence and is terrified of it at the same time. That yellow, dusty hospital in Mexico is a silent testament to the fact that there but for the grace of Hannibal go he.

He finds himself indulging in that crazy more and more often, soaking it in, reminding him that he’s not the only one, even though he tells himself that the best part is that no one will notice him, not when they have Murdock, spinning around and talking to his invisible dog, right there plain as day. He can hide in the shadows of Murdock’s insanity forever, he feels like.

If it occurs to him that there is more than one kind of insanity, Face never says anything.


	5. Chapter Four

Prison poses a problem, Face finds.

There’s only the one psychiatrist, Dr. Rutlidge, and she smiles sympathetically and writes down notes and he knows that there’s no way to get her to write him multiple prescriptions without telling her the truth, which is unacceptable. Hannibal said he would get them pardons, that last night, and he’s never lied to Face before. Wouldn’t start now.

So he picks the one that seems to help the most, the one that doesn’t make him feel sluggish. Therapy is all good and fine, but there isn’t a prisoner in the world who doesn’t feel depressed at some point, so she writes him a prescription for Welbutrin and taking just those two pills a day opens a whole new window for him; he has spent so long being scared of the ups that he forgot how they work, how he feels magnetic, drawing people to him because who doesn’t want to be around a beautiful person, glowing golden in the gray gristle fences around them? The guards gravitate toward him, he makes promises that he knows he can keep, he can charm the paint off the walls if he asks nicely (and he always does, sweet smile and baby blues batting until they’re peeling themselves off and taking him up on every honeyed word). 

It’s almost a shame when Hannibal takes that away from him—he takes a swing at the man, for destroying this charismatic, confident charming illusion he had built to protect himself. Hannibal blocks the punch, holding him down, and for a second it feels less like a hold and more like an embrace—

Then it ends. 

But the coaster is still clack-clack-clacking uphill, that pit of adrenaline in his stomach building up up Up UP UP so that he’s flying in a tank, God, only Hannibal’s plans, and feels like laughing out loud so he does, screaming and hanging outside and feeling like he’s in free-fall the entire time, which he is, so no one blinks an eye when he doesn’t hit the water with the rest of them. He’s still somewhere up in the atmosphere, laughing and cursing and taking swings at the clouds like _they're_ the ones who let him down, who destroyed his life, who took everything away from him. 

B.A. shakes with rage and Hannibal looks broken for the first time with disappointment, because how could anyone have planned for _this_?, and Murdock wavers with indecision. And Face--he shakes inside, and shouts at Hannibal, and he's back in free-fall but this time the ground is rushing up to him with maddening slowness. 

So he throws himself into making a plan, making it work, his mind grasping at everything all at once and turning it into something workable. All the variables, all the ways it can go wrong, everything melds together and he's holding it together with an outrageous smile and a quick dance of patter _Come on, fellas, which one is it under now? Is she under the left or the right or the middle the hand is quicker than the eye_ and that freight train running through him tells him that the mind, the mind is always quicker than anything; he knows it for a fact.

If the ground is rushing up, he won't feel it until after this is over, he promises himself. Then he'll let himself hit and be splattered into a million pieces all over the ground like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Just hang on a minute longer, Face, baby, it'll all be over soon.


	6. Chapter Five

The plan goes off without a hitch—just some ringing in Murdock’s ears and a few new bruises on Hannibal’s skin—and before long, Face has them in a cozy farmhouse where B.A. can retreat to bang out his anger on an old tractor and Murdock can play with the farm cats and Hannibal can drink up the last swallows of the setting sun.

Face finds an old Corvette that B.A. fixed up and takes it into the city, hits the night clubs, and feels the strobe light pulsing in time with his heartbeat. 

“Hey, handsome,” a man’s voice says, and he turns to see a wide grin and green eyes smiling at him. “Buy you a drink?”

“Sure,” Face says, putting a little bit more flirt in his voice than necessary. 

The man taps the bar. 

“Two of whatever he’s having,” he orders, gesturing to Face’s half-finished drink. 

Before the last song ends, Face and the man end up in a taxi cab driving to a condo with white, white walls and a bed so soft it should be illegal.

“Mmm,” the man groans as Face shoves him up against the wall. The buttons on his shirt pop off and he lets out a throaty laugh. “Slow down there.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Face says with a grin right before he drops to his knees and unzips the man’s pants. The rest of the night is a symphony of moans and “Oh, yeah, like that, right there,” and “Please, God, please, so close”. When the light outside finally starts to filter through the blinds, the man has his head turned into the pillow, snoring, and Face is pacing the balcony, wishing he had a cigarette. He never really took up smoking, not like the other guys, but he found it helps calm him down when things start going haywire. The early morning stillness finally gets to him and he finds his shirt and leaves before the man stirs.

He didn’t even catch his name.

Hannibal is there when he returns, sipping coffee from a green mug with a faded John Deere logo on it, reading a book on the porch swing.

“Good night?” he asks mildly, but there’s something sharp in his eyes.

Face means to grin and wink and say, “Of course,” offhandedly before going inside, ostensibly to sleep, but instead he finds himself pouring out each neon-streaked glass and sticky dance floor and throbbing music to Hannibal in a rush of words that he can’t stop. His hands hover in the air like birds, illustrating each detail as he jumps from one club to the next; the words keep rushing out of him like water, turning into ice chips, heavy and cold, when they escape. 

“Face,” Hannibal stood up at some point, his book discarded next to him. He walks up to Face with his hands loose in front of him, like he’s calming a skittish horse. One hand makes tentative contact with Face’s shoulder. “Face, listen to me.”

“You shoulda seen it, boss,” Face continues, thinking maybe it’s a good thing, because talking fast is supposed to be his specialty and maybe this time it’ll work on Hannibal, the one person he needs it to work most on, “This place had it all, you would have hated it, there were so many people. I never even knew you could fit so many people in one place like that, not enough space to even pace—”

“Face.”

And that voice, so calm and steady, has a note of concern running through it like an out-of-tune low E chord thrumming on a guitar. It almost drowns out the whooshing sound as the ground gets closer and closer.

“Face, what’s going on?”

Like a switch being pulled, Face shrugs off Hannibal’s hand, glaring at him. “What the fuck? What do you mean, ‘what’s going on’? Haven’t you looked around recently?” He bounces on the balls of his feet and gestures to the miles of emptiness around them. “There’s nothing for us! You lied to us, you said we would get pardons.”

Hannibal reels back a little at the accusation, the speed with which it was delivered. “I did,” he says slowly, but Face is already shaking his head.

“Sure, we got pardons, but not much good they’ll do us? Not full pardons, right? No excuse for escaping, none, none, none,” he feels his brain get stuck, like the needle of a record player and shakes it off, frustrated at the way his mouth suddenly feels clumsy against the onslaught of words his brain is supplying. “Nothing! There’s nothing for us. B.A. will go back to prison, Murdock will go back to that god-awful hospital, and you and I—”

“Is that what this is?” 

“What do you think?” Face spits out viciously. His mind suddenly feels clear and razor sharp. He stalks up to Hannibal, shoving him in the chest. “What do you think? What’s left for us now?”

“Face,” Hannibal says and Face can hear the warning in it, replacing that growing concern blossoming there a second ago.

“Huh? The great Hannibal Smith fucks up. Where’s your plan now, Colonel? Is this part of it? When are you going to light up one of those damn cigars and—”

He’s been pushing, he knows it, almost wants the fight he can feel coming, because this aching building up in him needs a focus, needs an outlet, before it tears him apart completely. He swings wildly and Hannibal blocks it, but he doesn’t expect the leg that aims for his knee, trying to knock him to the ground. He grunts as it impacts, staggers a little, and suddenly it’s real and Face can breathe just a little bit with every new bruise that forms. 

He’s too uncoordinated, too scattered, to fight coherently—always fight with your head, kid, he hears Hannibal’s voice say from twelve years ago—and soon Hannibal has him pinned down despite his wild thrashings. 

“This what you wanted, kid?” 

“Let me up,” Face says, a bit desperately. “Let me up.”

He bucks with his hips, earning a grunt out of Hannibal before the man leans his weight down again. “No, not until you tell me what the fuck is going on.”

There’s something dark behind Hannibal, something fluttering back and forth and dipping into the shadows and Face can’t help but stare at it. It keeps disappearing, reappearing right at the corner of his eye, and he doesn’t know why, but it feels _wrong bad evil_ and he just knows that if he takes his eyes off of it for one second, it’s going to do something horrible.

“Let me go,” he says again, frantic, “let me go.”

Hannibal frowns at him, glancing behind him where the tattered shadow is hiding against the wall. 

“What’s wrong?” he says in a softer tone.

“We’ve got to find Murdock and B.A. Where are they?”

“Asleep, probably, kid, what’s—”

“But you don’t know?” All those watery words melt, leaving him icy cold. “We have to find them. We’ve got to warn them.”

“Warn them about what?” 

“Please,” and Face never begs, but he has to make Hannibal understand, because it’s going inside the house now and—

The arms pinning him go slack and he scurries up, practically running into the house with Hannibal following behind. The stairs are creaking at him to hurry as he takes them two at a time, bursting open the door. B.A is sound asleep, but Murdock’s missing. 

“Where is he? Where’s Murdock?” Face shouts. He can’t seem to focus, can’t get his mind to think about what to do. He runs his hands through his hair, pulling on the strands, then whirls around, goes back downstairs.

Murdock is at the end of the steps and he staggers as Face throws himself at him. 

“What’s goin’ on, Faceman?” Murdock asks. 

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Face can’t keep himself from running his hands over Murdock’s arms and chest, like he was checking for broken bones or wounds hidden away. “They didn’t find you.”

“No, Facey, they didn’t find me,” Murdock says. He pulls away and looks at Face’s wild eyes, the way his hands keep twitching. Murdock runs a soothing hand up and down Face’s back, then pushes his hair off his forehead and tucks it behind his ear. “Hey, now, come on, it’s okay.” 

“It’s not,” Face suddenly whispers, sagging to the ground and rocking himself back and forth. “It’s not. It’s not okay.”

He barely hears the heavy sigh from behind him or the hand that tentatively rubs his back. 

Doesn't hear Hannibal's voice saying, "No, I don't think it is."


	7. Chapter Six

When he wakes up, he lies in bed staring out the window. It’s morning again, which means that he lost an entire day somewhere. The mad rush of thoughts is gone, replaced by the fuzziness that must have been the sedatives Hannibal gave him yesterday. 

God, what a train wreck. He winces thinking about it.

He needs to apologize, he knows. Yesterday—he was there, he remembers every thought, every action, remembers that, remembers it felt right and sensible, but the next day it’s like he snaps back into his body and is watching someone else direct him when he thinks about it. Like he was hitchhiking and someone else was in control of him while he stared out the window and suddenly the driver veered into a snow bank, and he has to explain why he wasn’t paying attention. But the guys don’t know that, don’t know it was someone else who was driving and flipping the stations on the radio, and he doesn’t know how to explain it, because that was him, undeniably, saying all those terrible things he didn’t mean and freaking out and talking too fast, so he needs to say he’s sorry, but he doesn’t know how.

Doesn’t know if he can, if he’s being honest, because there’s nothing he can say that will make this better.

C’mon, Facebaby, he thinks, think of something good, some silver-tongued lie that will smooth over things and make it all better, but nothing comes to him. 

“Fuck,” he mutters, rolling out of bed and pads over barefoot to the washroom to take a shower. 

The warm water feels heavenly, but he can’t even bring himself to enjoy it, too wrapped up in trying to come up with an excuse that doesn’t involve, “So, hey, I periodically go insane, hope that isn’t a problem?”. He laughs softly as he tries to imagine Hannibal’s face if he tried that. Maybe, “Murdock and I have a lot more in common than you thought,” or better yet, “Twice the crazy, twice the fun.”

Shutting off the water and drying off with a towel, he gets dressed as slowly as he can, still turning it over in his head. 

A good conman knows how to play it by ear, and Face is the _best_ conman. He can do this, just let Hannibal lead the conversation and figure it out from there.

That’s a plan, he figures. He runs a comb through his drying curls and stares at himself in the mirror, mustering up one of his megawatt grins in the reflection. He can hear Murdock banging pots and pans in the kitchen, probably making breakfast for everyone. A deep voice is yelling something at him—has to be B.A., who always likes to keep an eye on what exactly goes into Murdock’s omelets—which just leaves the boss. He’s probably outside, sipping coffee on the porch like the way he always does when they’ve got downtime.

One last check in the mirror and Face opens the door, taking a deep breath to brace himself.

Time to face the music, honey, and this time it's not the kind you only hear in your head.


	8. Chapter Seven

When Face walks into the kitchen, the conversation stops. From the look B.A. gives him, Face knows that Murdock or Hannibal mentioned something went down last night, but he at least wasn’t there to witness his breakdown. Murdock stares at him before smiling brightly.

“Hey, Facey,” he says, like there’s nothing at all wrong, and Face smiles back and plays along. He feels like a little kid, that by pretending nothing happened, it’ll all go away. “Want some breakfast?”

“Sounds good,” he says, pulling out a stool. “Can I get pancakes?”

“Of course!” Murdock says with a hint of a French accent. He always likes to pretend to be a chef when he cooks; it makes things more interesting, especially when he decided to be the Swedish chef from the Muppets for a whole week. 

“Chocolate chip?”

Face groans and plays along. “Trying to get me fat?”

“Someone has to,” Murdock replies with a glint in his eyes. “I’ll even make my special syrup to go with them.”

“You’re the best, H.M.,” Face says sincerely. If Murdock realizes he’s talking about more than the pancakes, he doesn’t say anything.

The conversation lags a bit as Murdock tries to find a spatula somewhere in all the cabinets, rooting through silverware and Tupperware to find the hidden utensil. B.A. sits silently, like he’s debating whether to say anything. Face decides to jump in before he can.

“How’s the project going?” he nods his head toward the barn outside. B.A. stares at him and Face feels his heart beat faster, wondering whether he would go along with this façade of normality they’ve got going. 

“Pretty good,” B.A. finally grunts. “I had to make a run into town to get some supplies, but the farmer should have a hell of a surprise waiting for him when he gets back.”

“I’m sure,” Face says. He’s been putting off the inevitable, but he swallows his fear and asks casually, “Where’s Hannibal?”

Murdock bangs his head on the underside of a cabinet. B.A. stares down into his coffee.

“Outside,” B.A. finally says. “He said he wants to talk to you about somethin’ when you got up.”

So much for pretending nothing happened. Face nods, not sure what to say. B.A. clearly wants to pretend that he knows nothing about it, at all. 

Face kind of does too.

“Right,” he says finally, adding a little laugh in there like he’s unconcerned, like this is going to be a normal lecture he gets from Hannibal whenever he screws up. “Well, let me eat breakfast before he bawls me out, at least.”

“He won’t bawl you out, Face,” Murdock says softly, looking up from where the batter is starting to sizzle. 

Face wants to believe that, but believing it means that he has to acknowledge that he did have an episode in front of God and Hannibal and Murdock. He swallows, puts on his game face. “Nah, it’s fine. I should be used to these lectures by now, right, guys?”

He tells Murdock he’ll be back in a minute for the pancakes and heads outside. 

Hannibal is right where he always is these mornings, sitting on the steps of the porch and taking sips from his coffee mug. Normally he looks content when he sits like this, like everything is right with the world, but even Face can see through that today. 

“Hey, boss,” he says, stretching his legs out beside Hannibal’s. “B.A. said you wanted to talk to me.”

Face carefully doesn’t meet the sideways look Hannibal gives him, assessing him. 

“How are you feeling?” 

“Good,” Face answers truthfully. “Fine.”

He’s just about to wonder whether it was better to jump in and explain himself or wait for Hannibal to ask when the man shifts beside him to get a better read. Amateurs jump in, explaining themselves before they're asked, while the greatest con men know that lies are meant to be doled out carefully. He fidgets under the hard gaze and wishes Hannibal would go back to staring out at the field in front of the house. 

“You ready to tell me what that was all about yesterday?”

Face wants to say, “No,” but that would mean admitting something had happened. Better to put it to bed quick, instead of letting it fester and rot. 

He laughs lightly, patently false even to his own ears. “Guess I was a little drunk still from the morning after.”

Hannibal arches an eyebrow and asks, “Drunk?” like he wants to add, “That’s really the excuse you’re going to use?” after it.

Face meets his gaze, because he may not be the smartest of them, but he can make up for it in pure stubbornness and determination. Never back down, brazen it out. “Yeah, boss, what can I say?” He shrugs helplessly. “Maybe someone slipped something in my drink, I don’t know. Look, I’m sorry, but I promise it won’t happen again.” 

There’s a long pause where he can hear Hannibal’s breathing and he makes sure to match his own to it, because if he doesn’t, he’s not sure he would inhale at all. 

Finally Hannibal breaks the moment with a long sigh and without a word, collects his mug and paper and disappears into the house. The screen door bangs closed after him, a sharp angry rattle in the cool quiet of the morning.

Face wonders when the hell his life went so wrong that lying to Hannibal was a better option than telling the truth. 

He stays outside a long time, but never comes up with a good answer.


	9. Chapter Eight

The weeks settle into a hushed sort of normality that Face alternately clings to and despises. B.A. disappears into the barn and seems uncertain how to talk to Face, anymore, and he wonders what exactly Hannibal and Murdock told him. Murdock keeps up the cheerful act that Face appreciates at first, but grows to hate. 

_Something happened!_ he wants to shout at them. _Stop pretending it’s all okay when it’s not_. It never comes out though. He just grits his teeth and bears it, laughing when he’s expected to and joining into the dinner conversations like everything is okay.

And it is, he thinks, it is okay now, he feels normal, utterly normal. Balance is something so precious when your sanity is perched on a teeter-totter, waiting for the other side to fall or rise. 

Hannibal is the worst, though. He’s avoided Face since that morning, like he’s unsure what to do or say, except that can’t be right, because the boss is the man with the plan—the one who always knows what’s going on. It’s driving Face crazy, he thinks with a small smile at the joke. Crazier than normal.

He seeks him out in the study, knocking on the door and standing uncertainly at the threshold. Hannibal barely glances up from his book.

“Hey boss,” Face says, pretending like he always does, except this time it’s important that Hannibal pretends back. “I just wanted to know if we were moving on soon.”

Hannibal considers it. “When are the owners supposed to be back?”

Face shrugs. “Not for a month or so. I just thought—”

“We’re good here,” Hannibal says as he goes back to his book. “We’ll stay for a while.”

“Okay,” Face ignores his disappointment. The house’s walls keep reminding him that they saw him in his moment of madness, too, and he feels like he can’t get away from them fast enough. If they kept running, they could leave this behind them and everything would go back to normal. They would treat him like he was normal, instead of something that’s been shattered and haphazardly taped back together. “Right.”

“That all?”

“Yeah, guess so,” Face says. He closes the door behind him and the creak of the hinges sound like something breaking a little more inside him. 

 

He doesn’t notice it, at first, even though he knows it’s coming eventually. Unlike the other kind, which builds and ratchets like a bolt being tightened too far, these spells are subtle. They sneak up on him and catch him off-guard. It is a slow descent into this kind of madness, nothing like the frantic, careening rush of the other ones.

One morning, he wakes up before everyone else, remembering the slow, hazy dreams he had last night. Random snippets of filtered blue halls of the orphanage and black and white collars, institutional grey-greens of the prison walls, muffled voices talking to him, about him, from far away.

The kitchen is still in disarray from dinner last night, but he manages to dig out a mug from the sink and waits for the coffee to drip into the pot. The quiet feels muffled, when there should be Murdock singing to himself as he cooks or B.A. grumbling or even Hannibal’s low chuckle when he’s trying to hide the fact that he’s amused. 

He sits out on the porch in Hannibal’s usual spot and stares out at the pasture. The sun is just starting to struggle over the horizon, languidly stretching her arms across the grass and into the nooks and crannies of the buildings, burning off the last droplets of dew from the night. A few of the horses softly nicker at each other. One of the cats from the barn is curled up on top of a post, lazily watching a field mouse make its way through the grass. 

He takes a sip from his coffee and thinks, _I’m content_ , right before he notices the tears running down his cheeks.


	10. Chapter Nine

He goes back to bed after that, not wanting to face the world when the sun is shining brilliant despite the fact that it must know everything is going to go gray soon. He can hear voices outside in the hallway, so the guys must be waking up and getting ready, but he can’t bring himself to go out again, so he just wills himself back to sleep.

When he wakes up again, he’s alone, even the voices in the hallway gone away to wherever faded noises disappear. He squeezes his eyes shut. Normally he has longer than this before the crash, but the drugs have apparently messed him up and thrown him off cycle because the world looks hazy already. The wallpaper is a dingy pastel yellow with little faded roses on it, peeling away from the corners. He stares at them dully. There’s no fog over them, but it feels like there should be. Like he’s trapped behind thick windows and looking at the outside from inside a glass cage.

The comforter is a thick insulation against the outside and he curls into it slowly, wrapping it around him as tight as he can. It feels like his whole body is filled with sand and one little prick will send it tumbling out in a cascade flow. The fan above him is making slow circulations, sending wafts of cool air over him that stir his hair, and he watches its rotation, counting each circle of the blades like the second hand of a clock ticking past. It keeps making a _ka-chunk_ sound each time it turns, the blades gritting against each other.

_Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk. Ka-chunk._

He hates this. He would hate this, if he could muster the energy to feel it. Worse than a dentist visit, because at least the numbing wears off eventually and is only over a few teeth, but this is like an anesthetic over his whole body. Everything slows down, goes away, and he’s locked inside his mind, constantly questioning and all the while a balloon swells in his chest, feeling like it’s going to break through his rib cage any minute and leave him nothing but a shell. He can feel it pressing against his ribs and wants nothing more to let it out except he doesn’t know how. It doesn’t feel like grief, not that sharp pang of losing someone that you know will be over soon, it just feels like—nothing. 

Nothing there.

_Ka-chunk._

Hollow. Numb. An aching like a phantom pain of a limb lost and his heart’s still trying to revive it, to make it move, but there’s no tendons, no muscles, no nerves to respond anymore.

The worst part? 

It’s only going to get worse. He can keep telling himself that it won’t last—Father Magill’s soothing cadence _This too shall pass_ \--but it’s a small comfort when time feels like it’s moving too slowly around him. 

_Ka-chunk._

He buries his face in the pillow and prays for sleep.

It’s the only respite he knows when one of these spells come over him, and it’s only going to get worse.


	11. Chapter Ten

The little cocoon he’s made out of a patchwork quilt and pillows keeps him warm when the inside of him is freezing over, winter settling in faster than he can stop it. He’s been holed up in his room for days, ignoring the light knocks on the door, Murdock telling him that breakfast or lunch or dinner is ready, B.A. asking him if he wants to go into town with him. Hannibal never knocks. He feels like hanging a sign on the doorknob. “Face is not available today. Sorry for the inconvenience.” 

One of the doctors had kept asking him what he felt during his bad spells. Whether he thought about hurting himself, if he thought that he wasn’t worth anything, all that, and he kept trying to explain that he didn’t feel anything. He remembers being desperate for her to understand, because it didn’t sound that awful when he said it out loud, but it felt like he was a night without any stars, surrounded by inky blackness and couldn’t hear or taste or do anything. That nothing he could do would make it any better, would bring him any small amount of pleasure. How no music ever reached past his ears and made him smile, no joke made him laugh, nothing existed outside of that black hole he lived in. 

How sometimes nothing can be a physical thing, like a dark so oppressive it swallows light. How that Nothing keeps spreading, pushing out all the other Things until Nothing was all that was left inside of him. 

She didn’t really get it. 

Everything fades away, even the knocking and soft murmurs through the door. The sunshine keeps creeping in and disappearing like a magic trick, but he can't feel it through the covers or on his face when it stretches long fingers through the blinds. The days are slightly better, something about the sun lulling him into sleep, but then the night comes and he's forced to stare at the walls and every terrible thought that he's hidden from in sleep comes out to haunt him, taunting stares from the corners of the room, accusations and recrimations and that cold desperation pushing against his ribs endlessly. 

One day he wakes up and stares at the constellation of cracks and stains on the ceiling. He gets out of bed, walks to the restroom without thinking about it, and finds the knife he keeps tucked into one of his boots. The linoleum is brown and the light fixture has bugs and dust covering it, muting the cramped room into a pale yellow. He puts the blade to his arm, thinking, _Not across the wrist, down it, follow the vein, perpendicular slash across the elbow_ because he read somewhere that’s how people used to kill themselves, the fastest way to exsanguinate. 

The blade barely makes a shallow cut. It’s too dull, hasn’t been honed in a while. He feels a sort of philosophical apathy settle over him, a mental shrug because he doesn't have the energy for a real one, a not-today type of acceptance. Resignation.

He stares at the thin line crawling up his arm, leaking red bubbles of blood, and replaces the knife back in his boot, before dream-walking back into the main room and falling under the covers. He wraps them tightly around his body, staring out at nothing, and doesn't even have to try to not think about anything at all.

There's really Nothing to think about, anyway.


	12. Chapter Eleven

They finally give up on coaxing or cajoling after a week.

B.A. is the one who bullies him into getting out of bed, rough voice completely at odds with his gentle hands. He lays out his clothes and waits for him to dress, pushes him into the bathroom and tells him gruffly to brush his teeth. 

Face stares at the sink, the tiny accumulation of water seeping through the drain, until B.A. squeezes some toothpaste onto a toothbrush and hands it to him. 

He’s annoyed, Face realizes dimly. Not at Face exactly, but he’s annoyed because he’s a mechanic, and he wants this to be a problem he can fix with his hands and skills, like a drain plug frozen on too tight. 

And if Face is honest, he wants that, too. He wants whatever’s broken inside his mind to be replaced, all the bad gunk drained out and replaced with new. He gets a sudden image of B.A. unscrewing the top of his head, pulling out his brain and glaring at it like it’s an oil filter that’s corroded through and replacing it with a brand new one. 

He opens his mouth to laugh and isn’t surprised when choked sobs come out instead. 

He spits out the foam in his mouth into the sink and retreats back to the main room, collapsing onto the bedspread. B.A. watches him, rubbing his shoulder to no reaction, before disappearing downstairs. 

Murdock finds him curled up on the bed staring out the window as he wishes it were dark outside. Without saying anything, he climbs onto the mattress and gently tugs at Face’s shoulder until he rolls over, then wraps him up in his arms. 

“Is it that bad?”

No telling him to buck up, no telling him to get over it, none of the things Face keeps telling himself. 

He nods into Murdock’s warm neck, breathing in his scent. He wants to say something, but he doesn’t know how to explain this, not in any way that makes sense. 

“Okay, honey,” Murdock murmurs, holding him tighter. “Okay.”

They lie like that for a moment more, before Face musters up the energy to ask where B.A. went, where Hannibal’s been hiding while Face froze inside in the middle of summer.

Murdock’s hesitates before reluctantly admitting, “They went to find you a doctor.”

Face thinks about it, about how he should be upset, should be mad, something, but instead he just nods and doesn’t say anything at all.

Murdock just holds him tighter, keeping him from turning into an ice-white statue where there once was a golden boy.


	13. Chapter Twelve

Murdock lies with him for a long time before gently persuading him down the stairs and onto the couch while he makes soup in the kitchen. He eats the entire bowl under Murdock’s watchful eye, but can’t bring himself to stay up any longer. The last thing he remembers before drifting off is Murdock covering him with an afghan, the sound of a van pulling up on the driveway, and the quiet murmur of voices from the porch. 

The worst is passing, he thinks, and the relief alone sends him into a dreamless sleep.

He wakes up slowly, the dying light from outside filtering in through the blinds. His arm feels warm, and it takes a moment for his fuzzy mind to realize that Hannibal is kneeling by the couch, eyes intent on Face. His shirt sleeve had ridden up at some point and Hannibal’s calloused thumb was stroking the angry pink line, too new to have faded white, traveling up his arm. 

Hannibal clears his throat. 

“Did you want to kill yourself?” he asks and he sounds so pained that Face wants to reassure him, but he doesn’t know how to without lying. They have fought together, been pinned down in situations where Death was so close they could reach and touch it, and he’s never seen Hannibal honestly scared until now. There are lines and swirls of fear at the corners of his mouth and he has to look down before he reaches out to smooth it away.

Face stares at where the line breaks under Hannibal’s hand, reappearing on the other side. 

“I don’t know,” he answers hesitantly. “The blade was too dull to really cut.”

“And you didn’t try again? Didn’t think about it?” 

Face shakes his head. He knows tomorrow all the knives will be hidden away, the pills in the cabinets tucked away someplace he can’t find.

There’s a silent moment, then Hannibal’s face crinkles like clay cracking in the sun. 

“Help me out here, kid,” he says tensely. “Help me understand.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Face says, then realizes how it sounds. He struggles to explain it. “It was like trying to decide where to go to eat, and you finally flip a coin, but when you get there, the place is closed. So you shrug and go to the other place.”

It sounds inane to him, but when he looks up, Hannibal has this sadness tinged in his eyes.

“Is that what your life—” Hannibal stumbles, tries again. “That’s all your life was worth to you? Flipping a coin?”

“No, Hannibal, it’s not—” He sighs, sitting up and drawing the blanket around him. Hannibal stays crouched in front of him, kneeling on the floor with one hand cupping Face’s knee and the other still rubbing across his arm. “It’s not like that. It’s someone else.”

“What?”

Face rewinds his memories, tries to think of a way to explain that now it’s like watching himself do it over his own shoulder, even though he remembers at the time what he was thinking—not much at all—and what it felt like as he dragged the blade against his skin. 

“It’s like someone else,” he revises. “I’m not… I would never do that, now. I just kind of turn off, and go away, and it’s like someone else is controlling me for a while, and then I wake up one day and they’re gone and I’m me again.”

Hannibal bows his head, thinking about it. It’s clear he wants to say something and Face waits him out.

He finally looks up into Face’s eyes. “This,” he says roughly, holding up Face’s arm, “may have been someone else doing it, but—it’s still you, kid.”

“I know that—”

“I know you do,” Hannibal interrupts. His face softens. “I do, I get it.”

Face looks at him skeptically and Hannibal shakes his head. “Okay, maybe not all of it,” he admits, “but I get enough. But what I’m trying to say is that even if it feels like someone else doing it, you’re still the one who’s going to be gone if you ever went through with it. And I can’t—”

His voice breaks and Face gets the feeling that he’s been drifting on the surface of this conversation and there’s a whole lot more underneath him that he’s not seeing. Hannibal climbs up next to him on the couch, releasing his arm, and cups his cheek in one hand. 

“Kid, we need you around,” Hannibal says. The same thumb that was pressing against that scar is caressing his cheekbone gently. “I need you.”

It feels beautiful, inevitable, time neither going too fast or too slow, but just right as Hannibal leans forward and presses a butterfly’s kiss against his lips. Face knows that the world should be spinning or something according to every love song that ever was, but he’s been there, been on that carousel, and this is a million times better because it feels like balance and peace and everything he’s ever wanted from life that he had given up on ever getting.

When they break apart, Hannibal leans his forehead against Face’s, cupping his head with both hands and smoothing back his hair and tucking it behind his ears. “Promise me,” he says roughly. “Promise me you’ll talk to me next time, please. Promise me that you won’t do this again.”

Face stares at him and breathes out a true, “I promise”.

He wasn't the one who did it in the first place.


	14. Chapter Thirteen

Hannibal steadies him, holds him safe and secure when everything spins out of control around him. 

Hannibal curls up with him on the couch, spooning him from behind, one heavy arm across his stomach, fingers curled around each other. Normally, Face would crack a joke, would kiss him again, would try and push for that conclusion they both want, but it’s not the ending of the story yet and they both know it. 

Face stares at their twined bodies in the reflection off the TV screen.

“Kid, I—“ Hannibal sighs heavy in his ear, a warm gust of breath against his skin. “I didn’t know what was going on with you. I thought—We went through your stuff.” The hand around his waist tightens, like he’s afraid Face will bolt. “We found the medication. Murdock said it was for depression.”

“It is,” Face says, wondering where this conversation is going. He knows he should be insulted at the implication hiding in Hannibal’s words, but he can’t really blame him. 

“The way you were acting, before,” Hannibal is tripping over his tongue in a way that he never does, “Murdock said—he said it was, said it was something else.”

Face rolls over in the narrow space, burrowing into the man’s broad chest. Those strong arms circle around him automatically. 

“Did you know?”

“Yes,” Face admits.

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Hannibal says quietly. 

“It wasn’t a big deal,” Face murmurs. He’s not ready to go into this yet, not when it’s so fresh and raw, like a scab being picked at before it can heal properly. “I was handling it.”

The chest under his ear rises and falls deeply several times and Face realizes Hannibal is trying to take deep breaths, control his anger. 

“I was handling it,” he insists. 

“You weren’t—you aren’t, kid,” Hannibal says. One of his hands strays to the tender skin of Face’s forearm again. “B.A. and I went into town today. There’s a doctor...”

“I don’t need a doctor,” Face says, a hint of fire in his voice. It feels good for any measure of warmth after weeks of winter. He clings to it, stokes the flames. “I’m fine. It’s good, Hannibal, I promise. It hit me fast and I couldn’t stop it, but it’s gone now. I’ll be fine.”

“Templeton,” Hannibal sounds serious, “this stuff doesn’t just go away.”

“I can deal with this.”

“No one’s saying you can’t, kid, but you can’t do it alone. Just talk to him. Please.”

He keeps expecting it to be like those offices he visited, with the plush chairs and the therapy art hanging on the walls, comfortably bland and desperately trying to cover up the sterile atmosphere with manufactured hominess. He waits for Hannibal to pull out a card and press it into his hand with a sympathetic smile and hidden relief that he doesn’t have to be the one to deal with Face anymore, but instead his calloused thumb just runs a slow circle over the warm skin of Face’s palm. It’s not relief, but a respite. Hannibal will wait for him to decide. Hannibal wants him to ask first. 

Face closes his eyes and presses his cheek into the fabric of the pillow, soaking up the warmth of Hannibal against his back, the gentle press of his lips against his ear, and waits. 

Hannibal will wait with him, will wait for him, and that thought loosens the band that's been holding his breath trapped inside.


	15. Chapter Fourteen

B.A. grounds him, a force as unshakeable as a rock.

Face finds him outside in the sanctum of the shed and quietly slips in. B.A. will chase anyone out if they make too much noise or disturb him, but he lets Face stay occasionally when he needs a haven. Face carefully clears out a space on the workbench and watches B.A.’s broad hands maneuver into the tight spaces of the engine he’s fixing. Those broad palms never waver in their work and the shed is nearly silent except for the sound of their breathing and the steady _tink tink_ of metal against metal. 

“Have I ever told you about my first car?” B.A. asks suddenly. 

Face shakes his head, handing over the socket wrench at B.A.’s gesture. The metal clangs against the bolt, prying it loose somewhere beneath the car. B.A.’s voice talks steadily over it.

“1977 DeTomaso Pantera GTS – beautiful, I’m telling you. You ever seen one?”

“No,” Face says, dragging his memory. He has a dim notion that it’s a nice car, but that’s about it. He always was one for the shiny, the outside appearance more important than the inside. He knows what car he needs to drive to convince someone he’s a businessman, what one he needs to show he’s an arrogant punk with too much money, but he’s never been about the nuts and bolts and inside mechanisms like B.A. is. 

B.A. whistles lowly. “I was hot shit in that car, man. Everyone stopped when I went by. But the engine was shot. I had to replace the damn transmission twice, the brakes kept going out, couldn’t keep the lines clean. Had to bleed ‘em every month or so. And the gas gauge was broke. Kept tellin’ me I had half a tank when I was runnin’ on fumes.”

“You fixed it?” Face asks. 

“Yup,” B.A. says. There’s the sound of metal groaning and he rolls out from underneath the car again, wiping his hands on a rag as he pokes around for a new bolt. “They never took though. Kept having to constantly put her up on blocks to make sure she would run.”

“How long did you keep her?”

“Seven years. I loved that car. My momma kept askin’ me why I didn’t get a new one, somethin’ more reliable, but I tol’ her that it was my car.”

“Why did you keep her?” Face asks, confused. 

B.A. keeps looking through his tools for a bolt, finally pulling one out and nodding with satisfaction. He looks at Face evenly. “I owed that car a lot. If it had run perfectly, I’d never have learned how to fix it, y’know? The more things that went wrong with it, the more I loved it, the more I learned. You see those guys with the hot-shot rice burners? You think they know how to fix ‘em when they break down? Nah, man. There’s no love, nothing to ‘em. And those suckas will break down at the drop of a hat.”

The ground beneath his feet has oil stains, staining the concrete a rusty brown color. Face keeps staring at them, feeling like it’s a Rorschach test. He tilts his head, trying to see a butterfly. 

“Yeah?” he echoes faintly. 

B.A. nods. “Yeah. Any of those cars that look real pretty on the outside have a lot more goin’ on in the inside. More bolts, lines, more things that can go wrong.”

“Seems like a lot of work,” Face says quietly. “You ever think it wasn’t worth it?”

“Whenever that sucka was giving me trouble, sure. But you learn how to fix the things that go wrong, keep up with ‘em, and they’ll outrun anything on the road.”

When B.A. talks like this, his steady deep voice rumbling as smooth as the engines he fixes, it’s in short bursts. He says what he needs to, never clogging up the air with unnecessary words. His conversations are like crocodiles, Face thinks, where all that’s visible is the surface and it looks like an ugly log, until they surface and the whole picture is revealed. Not pretty, not glib, but with meaning in their own right. Once he’s said what he needs to, he’ll sink down below the water again and neither Face nor Murdock nor Hannibal will get anything out of him again until he wants to talk.

Face slides out of the workshop and leaves B.A. to his work.


	16. Chapter Fifteen

Murdock sends him flying, surrounded by sky and whirling eddies of airflow.

He finds him in the upstairs bedroom and leans against the doorframe, watching Murdock as he stares out the window. The curtains have been pushed back, blinds pulled up, window open to air out the faint musty smell. It smells like lemon furniture polish, freshly laundered cotton, and hay. Face breathes it in before he gingerly sits on the bed next to his friend. Murdock grins at him and there’s an answer to a question Face didn’t even know he had in the white flash of teeth.

“You don’t take your meds,” Face says. It’s not an accusation, not really, just an observation and he squelches that small voice inside of him that insists it’s _not fair_ , that the team can only handle one type of crazy and that spot’s already been filled, brother.

“Sometimes I do,” Murdock admits. He sits back on the bed, letting his head and torso dangle upside down over the side, staring at the baseboards. “But that’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point?” Face asks, frustrated with this game.

Murdock shrugs as best he can against gravity. “The point is, Facey, that you’ve got a choice here. I’m not afraid of my crazy, but seems like you are. So you gotta make a choice whether the crazy is who you are or whether you’re too afraid to find out who you are without it.”

That makes sense, in a weird, Murdockian kind of way. Face joins him, letting his body flatten out and lean back so that he’s joining Murdock upside down. Maybe a change of scenery will turn everything right-side up.

There’s a comfortable silence, when Murdock’s hand creeps down from where he’s thrown it across his chest, inches along the duvet, and grabs Face’s in his, letting their fingers intertwine. Face stares at them, long thin fingers tangling together on top of the flowery pattern.

“You made that choice?”

“Sure. Everyone does. Some people go their whole life bein’ so afraid of what their answer will be that they don’t even realize they already made it. They’re on the third floor.” Psycho ward, Face remembers. The ones considered a danger to themselves and others. The kind who cry at night and bang on the walls and keep insisting that they’re everyone except who they are. “But that doesn’t mean a thing for you. You gotta make that choice, Face-man. And don’t go usin’ me as an example. I’m one of a kind, baby.”

Face cracks a smile at that, glancing at Murdock and his wide grin. “That you are, buddy.”

“So there you go,” Murdock says, pleased, like he’s just made it easy and that crazy Face-guy keeps complicating things that are really very simple. 

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe he’s just overthinking things, and what he really should be concentrating on is how good it feels to have someone holding his hand as easy as two kids, best friends, walking down the street to school and both scared and neither one willing to admit it; how warm the sunshine through the blinds feels on where his t-shirt has ridden up and the light pools on his skin; how everything is upside down and his brain keeps reminding him that he’s hanging the wrong side but his eyes keep telling him he’s right-side-up. 

Maybe.

One way to find out, but for now, he's content to stare upside down out the window into that expanse of blue through the small square window, lying with his best friend on an old, well-loved bedspread on a summer day.


	17. Chapter Sixteen

The next day, Face creeps out of the house in the early morning and crunches along the gravel driveway to the car, feeling the dewy grass brush his jeans into dampness. Hannibal was snoring when he left him tucked under the covers, all sprawled limbs under patchwork, and it hadn’t been hard to search his wallet and pockets until he found the small, discreet card with the words, “Dr. Aharnish Malhotra, Psychiatrist” printed in neat lettering on it. 

It’s the first verse of a well-known song, one that Face can sing along to with his brassy tenor. 

Still, he remembers Hannibal’s patience, B.A.’s firm words, and the cryptic words of wisdom from Murdock, and he takes a deep breath as he follows the curving back-roads and listens to the hum of his car as it joins along with the lyrics. 

The building is exactly what he expected. It’s tucked away in a wooded area, nicer, the type of houses that Face used to eye enviously, and he rides the elevator up to the fourth floor. There’s a waiting area with magazines sprawled lazily on the tables, warmly lit and fake plants tucked away into the corners. A row of teller windows, like a bank, are occupied by pretty receptionists with scrubs on. One of them smiles at him and he smiles back automatically. It feels familiar, just like the paintings on the walls and the magazines on the desk. The form is the same as every other one he’s ever filled out. He barely has to concentrate to fill in the blanks with the fake information from his forged ID before he turns it in and sits down to wait. 

“Mr. Barry?” 

“That’s me,” Face rises with an easy smile. 

“I’m Dr. Malhotra. Follow me, please.”

The doctor is a slender man with neat black hair and a dark complexion and dark eyes. He holds out a hand and Face shakes it, following the man back to his office. There’s a line of windows along the west wall. The carpet is brushed with the dappling of tree leaf shadows that dance and sway; they’re reaching the refrain, the part where it becomes a duet, the doctor singing the praises of medicines and Face will bow out gracefully before exiting stage left.

He waits.

“So, I hear you’ve been having some troubles?”

“A bit,” Face says. 

“Have you ever been to see a psychiatrist before?”

“A few times,” Face says.

“And?”

“They told me I was bipolar,” Face explains. 

“Do you agree with that?”

That was the first time someone had asked him that, Face blinks. Dr. Malhotra stares at him, bemused, apparently unaware that he’s going off script. 

“I… I don’t know,” Face says slowly. He recovers quickly. “I mean, aren’t you supposed to be the doctor?”

“I am,” Dr. Malhotra smiles. “But it’s always good to hear it from the patient’s mouth. Things like these are pretty subjective. The most we can do is listen to your experiences, tell you what it sounds like, and see if the diagnosis holds the pattern.”

“And prescribe medication for it,” Face adds.

“That, too,” Dr. Malhotra agrees. “So why don’t you tell me about what’s going on.”

Face runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t really know where you want me to start.”

“Well, why don’t you tell me why you came here?”

“A friend asked me to.”

“A good friend?”

“Yeah,” Face says with a soft expression on his face. 

Dr. Malhotra makes a note on his chart. “Why did this friend ask you to come?”

“He’s worried.”

“Does he have any reason to be?”

“If you’re asking whether I’m going to hurt myself-” Face begins.

“Just a question.”

“Right,” Face blows out an angry breath. “Sorry. I just… I wasn’t acting—I don’t really know how to explain this.”

Dr. Malhotra puts his pen down and crosses a leg over his knee, leaning back in the chair in a move that Face recognizes as one he uses when he needs to put someone at ease, or convince them that he’s harmless. Even knowing that the man is aware of what he is doing doesn’t stop Face’s body from releasing some of the tension he wasn’t aware it was holding.

“It’s like a clock,” he says, and the man just nods, like he has any clue what Face is talking about. He persists, his hands dancing in the air, painting a picture in broad strokes. “Or a watch. Like an old-timey pocket-watch that gentlemen used to carry, very ritzy, very Gary Cooper.” He winks and the man graces him with a small smile as he continues. “But it works, you can look at it and see the time whenever you want to.”

One hand holds itself in the 12 position, while the other inexorably ticks past. Tick. Tick. Tick.

“All of these tiny, perfectly fitted golden parts, moving in tandem. They’re all fitted for each other, perfectly in alignment – they don’t all serve the same purpose, but they all rely on each other to carry out their individual purpose.

So you’re going along, and all you want to know is the time, so you look at the face of the watch, and it tells you, time for lunch, time for bed, time for a re-run of Magnum, P.I. I always liked Tom Selleck. He had the cool car, too.”

He pauses, his hands still ticking past as if he’s unaware of their presence, grinning as he thinks of the shiny Ferrari that as a kid he wanted so bad he could taste it. 

“But?”

The memory clouds and his smile sours. 

“But then one day the clock says it’s 10:13, but you look outside and of course, it’s not. Because one little part got jammed and isn’t working right, so all the other parts are still trying their best, but they can’t, because that one part is broken.”

And that’s the crux, he thinks. He’s broken, but he’s not sure how to fix himself, so he tells himself he’s not. 

“The clock can be fixed, though,” the man says with a gentle smile. “Just takes some time.”

“And new parts,” Face quips with a grin. “Can’t forget that.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe the old part just needs some oil, or some fine tuning, and it will work again.”

“I don’t like 10:14,” Face says dismissively, leaning back in the chair and propping his chin on the palm of his hand to stare at the strip of wall above the window. “It feels like it’s wishy-washy.”

“Wishy-washy?” and the man says it like he doesn’t know whether he should be laughing or not. 

“Yeah, it’s not quite 10:15, which is nice and a perfect quarter, but it’s too far away from 10:00 to say it’s that.”

“I think we’re straying from the point,” the man says pointedly.

Face shrugs. Maybe. He stares at the clock, watches it go tick-tick-tick past. 

He remembers his physics professor. He was a young man who wore an old man’s clothes, awful sweater vests made of brown wool and yellow ties, and he always smelled like chalk. The others in the class, engineers and political science majors and liberal arts kids who struggled through the basics, thought he was boring and made fun of him behind his back, but Face liked the guy. When he wrote equations, it was like seeing Dvorak’s Rusalka in the numbers and creating stars on a flat graph of the night sky. None of the other kids saw what Face did in math: a variable stretching toward infinity, the eccentricity of the orbit, and binaries that eclipsed like a selenehelion through a black piece of paper poked with pinholes. It was a work of creation, light and darkness and the sublime mingling in a clash of numbers and rules that were made to be broken. 

He sometimes thought, sitting in the fourth row from the back, crammed into a tiny desk and jotting cramped notes into a beat-up notebook, pretending not to care because Face was too cool for school, baby, that this was what Father Magill saw when he read the Bible, because the numbers were without form and void, and then they slowly coalesced into something that was good: an answer. One time, when he was young and still thought that the rest of the world saw things the way he did – patterns and stars that were not supposed to exist and a Russian nesting doll of subatomic particles fitting together – that the Book of Genesis was an equation that no one else saw. F(x) = sin (1/x). And God divided the light from the darkness.

He wonders why God saw fit to divide him into two discrete parts, and which part is the dark, and which part is the light.

And which part is him, Face, the one who sees the connections and knows that equations are part of the balance of the universe, sees that homeostasis is a way of saying equation, and _umwelt_ is what makes Billy real to Murdock and invisible to the rest of them, and that consensual reality makes allowances for it all, and he wonders what kind of God would make him see the connections in everything except the way that he feels split between two worlds that no one else can see.

He especially wonders what happened, that all the books think it’s comforting to say that bipolar can make you see those connections, but never talk about the teachers who are baffled by it all, or the people who want to take that away, or the way that it sometimes feels like they have turned something sacred into a nest of dry neural pathways that somehow explain who he is, an equation of chemicals that are imbalanced and say nothing of the soul that Father Magill believed in, that Hannibal cherishes, that B.A. protects, that Murdock nurtures. 

It’s the first time math has failed him so utterly. He doesn’t think that he can find an equation to explain himself.

“What are you thinking about?” Dr. Malhotra prods gently.

Face turns away from the clock, from all those moving parts that symbolize a theory so vast that even physics cannot always explain it – just like him, nonlinear.

“Nothing,” he says with a smile. “Just wondering when lunch is.”


	18. Chapter Seventeen

He isn’t going to see Dr. Malhotra again, he knows that, for reasons he hasn’t quite sorted out himself. They’re moving on soon and he doesn’t want to spill his guts to someone who will soon be nothing but a bumpy image in a rear-view mirror. The other reason is hidden at the bottom of his jeans pocket, an innocuous, terrifying piece of paper with a doctor’s lethargic scrawl written at the bottom. None of them ask, and he doesn’t offer, content to hide in the loft with Murdock and bark at the cats who wander too close, bring B.A. lunch when he forgets himself inside the innards of rust and rot, and when night finally sweeps in, sit on the front stoop with his hands braced behind him against the warped boards of the front porch.

“Hey,” Hannibal says softly, the screen door banging lightly closed behind him. Face glances up, pre-occupied, but offers a soft smile in return, moving over to make room when Hannibal sits down next to him. They stare at the evening for a moment, both ignoring the quiet shushing of katydids and frogs crying out for rain. 

“Penny for ‘em?” Hannibal says, taking a sip from his mug.

“Nothing much. Just thinking.”

“About?”

Face pulls his arms around himself like he’s cold, even though there is only the barest hint of a breeze rustling through the weeds. “I miss it, sometimes,” he says, so low that Hannibal almost doesn’t catch it at all. He throws a flash-quick glance at Hannibal before turning away again. “I miss the music.”

“Music?” Hannibal asks. Face doesn’t talk much about what exactly goes through his head, just cleans up the aftermath and stubbornly insists that it’s fine. He wonders if Hannibal resents that sometimes.

“I heard music, the first time, before things got—bad,” Face says haltingly. “I was out running and it felt like I was a coil and it kept getting tighter and tighter, so I couldn’t breathe. And then suddenly I heard this music, like a symphony, except it was coming from the sky.” He scrubs his mouth with his sleeve, laughing a little. “I thought—”

He trails off, and Hannibal nudges him with his shoulder, expression open. “You thought?”

“I thought that angels were singing to me,” Face mutters. “It wasn’t like a tune or anything that I can remember, but something that I could feel in my soul. Like they were singing through me or something. Like a song made out of feelings and emotions, not—”

He breaks off, voice harsh, like he’s embarrassed. “I know it sounds crazy.” 

“It sounds beautiful,” Hannibal says quietly. 

Face looks up instantly, pathetically grateful that someone understands. He spent so much time burying the song under _I knew it wasn’t real_ and _it’s crazy_ and _please don’t lock me away_ that he sometimes forgot the melody that still echoes dully in his bones. “It was.”

He closes his eyes against the heartbreaking, achingly gorgeous sound of it that he can still barely remember sometimes, like a memory playing over a tuneless radio. The distilled glory of a trembling, high vibrato, each delicate strand of the universe singing with his very being; waiting for the grandest _prima donna_ of all to cast out the libretto and execute an aria that was born from the very beginning of the cosmos. All for him, for his soul to sing with. And each psychiatrist telling him that this was something to be taken away, strip him bare, and leave him with an emptiness inside where Heaven once resided. The memory fades, leaving a sharp pang in its absence. 

“So that’s why you didn’t want to take the medicine?” 

Face smiles wryly without looking up, staring at the weed he’s been busy twisting into shapes between his hands. “I’ve got a million reasons why I didn’t want to take the medicine.”

“Okay, try me,” Hannibal offers. 

“Alright,” Face says easily. “How about because lithium makes you fat?”

Hannibal lets out a low chuckle. “Sure. What’s the next one?”

“Also gives you acne.”

“That would suck,” Hannibal agrees, sharing a smile with Face.

Face turns back to the weed, not surprised when the stalk finally snaps into jagged pieces. He continues in a quieter voice, “How about I don’t know—I don’t know if I exist.”

“What do you mean?” Hannibal pries gently. 

“I mean,” Face sighs with frustration, uncertain how to explain. “This is what I know. I had my first ‘manic episode’ when I was nineteen, but that was just the first bad one. I always had spells, good and bad, and no one ever told me that it wasn’t supposed to be like that. That most people have moods because of something, because they had a bad day or something really great happened. I thought it was just something everyone had.”

Hannibal nods, waiting him out.

“And I don’t know… if this medicine takes that away, I don’t know if there’s anything else left. This is who I am, Hannibal,” he says, locking terrified blue eyes with Hannibal’s. “What if the medicine makes me someone I don’t even recognize?”

“You’re worried that you’re going to be a new person,” says Hannibal.

Face nods, looking at the whorls in the wood planks beneath his feet. “Yeah, I guess.”

They sit in silence for a minute. 

“I wish I knew what to tell you, kid,” Hannibal says, rolling the mug between his hands. “I wish I had a plan that would make all this better.”

Face shakes his head miserably and says, “I know. Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Hannibal corrects him. “It’s just above my pay-grade, kid.”

“So you think I should keep going to doctors? Take the medicine?” His face is neutral, but there’s a sour note in the words. 

“If you need to. If you’re scared of what this is,” Hannibal says. He leans back, elbows behind him and legs stretched out in front. The mug dangles easily from his hand, the last dregs nearly staining the wooden porch. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the person I saw? The one who picks fights and sleeps around? Or the one who can’t get out of bed or use any of those twenty thousand moisturizers you got in there—”

“They’re not all moisturizers,” Face mutters, but he’s smiling when he says it.

“Well, whatever they all are, still too many,” Hannibal grumbles the familiar complaint. His voice turns serious again and he puts a hand on the back of Face’s neck, a steady pressure at his nape. “I’m just saying, that’s not the same man who arranges for B.A. to visit his momma, or the one who plays Sorry with Murdock all night long when he can’t sleep.”

Face’s head ducks, but Hannibal’s hand follows. 

“That’s not the same man who I picked to be on my team, the one I trust with my life.”

He squeezes a little and returns to his casual pose, neither of them looking at each other. There’s a faint sound of a car passing on the distant road, swallowed up under the trees moaning, the soft shuffling of horses grazing in the pasture, chorusing crickets singing their summer canon to the stars. 

“I am that man.” It’s soft, barely there. “That guy and the one who stays up for a week and the one who sleeps all the time and can’t face the world – it’s all me. It’s just different parts of me.”

“Then you need to figure out how to make it work somehow. Maybe the medicine doesn’t take anything away, just puts it together. I don’t know. I just know that one of those parts of you is going to destroy you someday if you keep going like this and I can’t – I don’t know a lot about this stuff, Face,” Hannibal runs a hand through his hair and lets out a frustrated breath. “But you know that expression, ‘you can’t have joy without sorrow’? It works both ways. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something good to get rid of the bad.”

There’s a long silence, eaten up by the fluttering of a moth hitting the patio light over and over again, drawn to it for some inexorable reason and fighting itself to get there. It makes him think of Murdock’s words yesterday about chaos theory, about the way his life is working on proving how close entropy really is, and Face’s thoughts drown out the sound as he wonders about all the things he could say, things he has said, things he wishes he knew how to put into words. 

“It’s not that easy,” Face says finally. His voice is tightly strung, like he’s balancing on a wire somewhere in his head and Hannibal looks like he wishes he knew what Face was thinking so he could remind him that he was always going to be there to catch him when he fell. Face knows that, it’s just the believing that’s hard.

Instead, Hannibal settles on a long sigh. “I know, kid. But the things that are worth it never are.”


	19. Chapter Eighteen

He looks in the mirror and wonders what the guy on the other side of the glass sees. There’s a guy standing there, with his hands braced against the cool marble counter, blonde hair falling in perfect disarray, bedhead look, and blue eyes staring. He tries on a charming smile, the megawatt one, and that guy’s name is Face, the one who can scam the red off a cardinal and it would still sing a sweet song because he made the ride so much fun. He pulls down the collar of his shirt and sees the light rose blushing on his skin because Hannibal forgot to shave and his stubble rubbed against there when he spread light kisses all over Face’s neck – that’s Hannibal - _John's_ \- lover, the one who he calls Temp when he’s close and holds near after and falls asleep next to, one arm curled around his waist. Then there’s the other kid, with the same too blue eyes that shine occasionally with something that’s not quite sadness but not hope either - that’s Templeton, beaming sticky smiles at the nuns and crawling into their laps and chattering endlessly to indulgent smiles. He’s there, too, buried somewhere deep and locked away. 

He doesn’t see the guy who has an answer to all this.

His jeans are still lying on the floor where he left them last night. He picks them up and rifles through the pockets until he finds the prescription, turns his back to the mirror and leans up against the counter as he stares at it. Hannibal's words billow up, echoing in his head, and he rolls the edges of the paper between his finger and thumb until it wrinkles and the corner tears a tiny bit.

Two pills a day doesn’t seem that big of a deal. He’s taken more ibuprofen for a headache than that; he used to take an assortment just to keep things in control, but that was different, because this- this means that there’s something wrong with him. It’s written in between the inky stains of lines and the spaces between the letters. There’s something wrong with you. We have to fix it. Don’t you want to be normal? 

There’s a sound of shifting clothes and he looks up to see Hannibal watching him from the door-frame. 

“Thinking about it?”

“Maybe,” Face says, and his hands feel too warm. He wipes them on his boxer shorts and grimaces. “I don’t know.”

“Face… whatever you decide,” Hannibal says cautiously, taking a few steps forward, “we’re not going to leave you.”

“I know,” Face says. It almost sounds true. He waits for the ‘but’. 

“We won’t,” Hannibal repeats and he’s suddenly right there, pulling Face in toward him, one arm wrapped loosely around his shoulders and the other at the small of his back. Face leans in, breathes in the smell of cologne and sleep-warmth and the cigar smoke that lingers in Hannibal’s hair. He brushes his cheek against a shirt that still remembers the thick quilt wrapped around it not long ago. 

“Maybe just for a while,” Face sounds muffled against faded cotton. “A trial basis.”

“Okay.”

“No promises,” he warns, and he feels Hannibal nod as he says, “Okay” again.

Hannibal pulls away after a moment, leans down to catch Face’s eye and cups his cheeks between his palms. “It’s okay. Whatever you decide, it’s okay. But you gotta promise me one thing.”

Here it comes. Here’s the moment when he gets the ultimatum – my way or the highway, kid – and the conditions and Face learned a long time ago that love was never, ever unconditional, so why the hell does it still hurt to know what’s coming?

“Promise me you’ll say something next time. It doesn’t have to be me,” Hannibal continues, “or even Murdock or B.A. but just – talk to someone. Don’t let it get to that point again.” 

He doesn’t have to reach for the thin skin of Face’s wrist for Face to know what he’s talking about. 

He nods, swallows the rising emotion that is getting caught in his throat and suffocating him just a little bit. His voice is hoarse when he answers. “I won’t. I promise, I won’t, I’m so sorry, John. I'm so sorry."

“It’s okay,” Hannibal hushes him, carding through his hair. “It’s okay.”

And even with his face streaked with salt and saline and a hitching sensation in his chest, Face, for the first time since this whole thing began, thinks that maybe it can be.

 

They’re leaving today. They were supposed to have left this morning, because Hannibal decided they had stuck around long enough and wanted an early start, but Murdock wanted to say goodbye to all the critters and they spent two hours alone tracking down the mean-tempered yellow tom with the tufts of fur missing from his tail. Then there were arguments about who was going to drive and where to stop for food and the last-minute check where they went through and made certain everything was in its place and they hadn’t forgotten something. 

Face isn’t superstitious, not more than any soldier is, but he sometimes feels like all the bad that went down is still lingering there and he feels sorry for the farmer who’s going to come back to a house with peeling yellow wallpaper saturated with shreds of madness. He only hopes that he and Hannibal and Murdock and B.A. left enough good things behind to cancel it out – maintain the balance. 

“Ready to go?” Hannibal comes up behind him, a steady hand on his shoulder. The bags are loaded and B.A. is already behind the wheel, slapping Murdock’s hand whenever it ventures too close to the knob on the radio. 

They left it too long – the sun is already awake, far above them in the middle of the sky, and he grins at how cliché it would have been to leave at sunrise; he never liked metaphors anyway.

The heat of Hannibal’s hand slides away, and he looks at Face with a questioning expression.

“Yeah,” Face says. “I’m ready.”

And he thinks that maybe this time he really is.


	20. Missing Scenes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> These were some scenes that popped into my head but just didn't fit within the story. Enjoy!

Hannibal’s hands are playing along his ribs like silent piano keys, fitting into the slots between each bone and stroking the skin gently there. Face lets out happy ivory sighs, a satisfied harmony in the dark of the room. 

That warm calloused hand, so adept at drawing out sweet sounds from the body curled up beside his, drifts down and catches on the knob of his hip and rests there. There’s a reticence, a strange hesitance, in the motion and Face makes a murmuring noise that is almost a question.  
“Face?” Hannibal’s voice is soft, like Face has the choice to ignore it if he wants. 

He finds that he doesn’t want to, though, and turns over, barely able to make out the blue of Hannibal’s eyes from the moonlight drifting in through the window. 

“What is it?” 

He hesitates again, thumb playing along the indentation between Face’s hip and ribcage. “You remember

“I know,” Face says, puzzled at the low discord of ache in Hannibal’s voice. He lifts a hand to rest gently on Hannibal’s neck, brushing through the short gray hair that curls just a little at his nape when it gets too long. His fingers play in the strands briefly, stroking them between the pads of his fingertips. “I know that.”

 

“Going out?” Hannibal said lightly. He turned another page in the novel he had lifted from off the dresser of the master bedroom, chomping on a cigar and looking for all the world like he was perfectly content. 

Face shrugged, his hands fidgeting with the hem of his shirt, plucking at the seam nervously. “Yeah, I figured I would see what kind of night life this place has to offer. Drive into town, go to the bars, the usual.”

Hannibal was perfectly content to read a book on the porch, watching the last swallow of sunshine sink below the horizon. B.A. had happily disappeared into the shed of the place they were staying after unearthing an old 1966 Corvette that had seen better days. Murdock looked pleased as punch to be sitting on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and Skittles in his lap, watching cartoons.   
Face just felt restless, feeling that urge to talk to people, get out and do something before he went stir-crazy sitting in this old place while the real owners were on vacation.

“Think we should lay low for a bit,” Hannibal said. He didn’t look up from his book, didn’t make it an order, but Face could feel the disapproval thick and clinging to the air around him. 

“I’ll be careful,” Face said with a grin, ready to be bouncing off again. It wasn’t really an answer, but Hannibal hadn’t really made it a question, so he took off before the man could say anything else. There were some things he didn’t want to explain, like how they hadn’t stayed in a place long enough to get more medications, how he could feel it bubbling up inside of him, the desperate knowledge that he needed to be _away_ before it got bad. Like how if he just ran fast enough in the mornings, or paced the perimeter restlessly at night, it might go away. 

 

 

He could feel it, like an itch just under the surface of his mind. He twitched, trying to throw it off.

“Something the matter?”

“No,” Face snapped. He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease the tension building up under them, choking off his air, making his heart beat faster. 

Hannibal gave him a level stare that Face fidgeted under. It was hard to stop that recently. 

 

 

Everyone is awake when he pulls up – hazards of being military so long, Face thinks. Old habits are hard to break. He walks in and Murdock is perched on the countertop like a cat, all long lines and sharp green eyes, while B.A. mutters something about him leaving scuff-marks with his shoes but shaking his head fondly all the same. Hannibal is sitting at the table and he looks up at the squeak of the screen door, tracks Face as he walks in and hangs up the keys on the hook. 

Face loves being the center of attention, but not like this.

“I’m starved,” he announces, which isn’t true, because his stomach is still doing flips that he blames on the tacky-sweet candy he stole from the waiting room when he left. “What’s for breakfast?”

Murdock swings his legs down and lets them hang. “Grilled rhinoceros steaks with a piquant basil-thyme marinade and smoked asparagus. Or sandwiches.”

“Sandwiches sound good,” Face grins, wondering what Murdock would say if he had asked for the rhinoceros. He busies himself with pulling out the mayonnaise and a half-cut tomato and slices of white bread.

“Very good, suh,” Murdock sniffs, folding a paper towel over his arm like a linen napkin. He bows lowly and starts digging out a plate. “Would suh prefer a white soda or red?”

“Oh, I think I’ll have the green, waiter,” Face says playfully. There’s something stunningly normal about it, even though Murdock is about as far away from normal as Face is to okay. 

“Where were you?” Hannibal’s rumbling voice interrupts, and Face freezes, forces his hands to keep making the motions, dip the knife into the jar, slather, rinse, repeat. 

“Out,” he says, then adds, “I went to town,” hoping that will be the end of it. Not now. Not yet. He will, he can, just not right now.

“Face…” Hannibal begins, then cuts himself off, shaking his head. “Never mind.”

The thread of tension holding him together snaps and Face lets out a shaky breath at the reprieve. Hannibal won’t let this go, he knows, but he can deal with it later. 

 

 

“Don’t,” he says seriously. His hands are shaking and he clenches them into fists, releases them with a breath. “Don’t do that.”

“What?”

“That – where you watch me and everything I do must be because there’s something _wrong_ with me,” he spits it out. “I know what this is and you don’t so don’t try to tell me that it’s something when you don’t know.”

“I’m not – “ Hannibal begins, and Face whirls to face him. He holds his hands up, then drops them by his sides. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“I know, but everyone – I’m still Face, so don’t treat me like—“

“A pathology,” Murdock pipes up. Everyone turns to look at him, and he shrugs with a wry smile. “Like a diagnosis? You are more than your diagnosis, grasshopper.”

He delivers the last like a wise karate master, solemn and inscrutable, and it makes Face laugh, lets some of the tension drain out of his shoulders. 

“Duly noted,” Hannibal says with a nod.


	21. Author's Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Author's note

I normally don’t write these, but this one is close to my heart. Not because I’m especially proud of the writing or think it has the best plot, either.

Most people say to write what you know, but every time I pick something personal to write about, it ends up coming out wrong; everything I want to say comes out cluttered, because there’s too much to draw on, too many experiences to be linear.

Bipolar disorder is something I have a not inconsiderable amount of experience with, and it’s one of the more confusing things to write about because everything about it is so visceral. There are a lot of emotions and sensations involved and I never feel like I can do what is an intensely personal feeling justice. I tried, though, while still trying to balance out Face’s characterization with my own feelings on the subject. 

The other thing is the style, which is so completely out of my normal style that editing this was like reading someone else’s writing. I decided on a third person limited point of view because I realized quite quickly that I have no idea what bipolar looks like, but I do know how it feels; I tried to convey that abruptness and loss of balance in the writing, but I’m not certain I succeeded. The present tense was another thing that I’m not sure worked. I don’t often (read: never) write in present tense, but when I finally got a handle on how this was going to go, it came out, and it seemed right somehow.

You may have also noticed some odd constructions: _glowing golden in the gray gristle fences around them_ and _in one place like that, not enough space to even pace_ , for example. One is the pretty basic alliteration that I'm sure you all know, while the second is an example of what's known as [clanging](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanging), a mode of speech characterized by association of words by sounds rather than concepts. Both are common to see in manic behavior; in fact, it's been shown that poets are more likely to have bipolar disorder, and it's postulated that this particular freedom to make connections between unlike things and wordplay may be one reason why. I also tried to liberally sprinkle some references to a few familiar works in there - "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ , to name two. 

The end result is —- well, I’ll let you decide.

The ending was something I struggled with for reasons that have just become clear to me: namely, that there is no ending, at least not one I’ve found yet. I’ve had years to come to terms with it and some days I still feel like it’s a work in progress. Some days you forget about it completely, some days it’s there right in your face, but it’s never going to go away completely, not even with medicine. I wanted to end on a hopeful note, but this isn’t something that has a neat closure where everything is tied up in a bow, which is how stories should normally end.

I dithered on whether or not to have a "crisis" moment, that time of the story when our character grows and realizes what he needs to do - but it wasn't to be. This story ended up going a lot more into the head than I expected it to, and a lot slower and dreamier than I expected as well. I don't know if it would have worked better to have your typical climactic event, but I think it's a tad more realistic this way - to agonize over what to do and finally come to a slow realization, rather than a jarring epiphany. If you think otherwise, please let me know. 

Face’s friends standing by him and helping him is something that I know from personal experience doesn’t always happen, so this story may have shades of wish-fulfillment about it. The reality can be much harsher, a lot bleaker. 

If you know someone who’s bipolar and getting frustrated with them or just don’t understand what they’re going through, this is what it feels like. This is what they go through. And if they don’t take their medicine all the time, or especially if they just were diagnosed, it’s not so simple as “medicine will make you better”; all those concerns, from the petty and vain (lithium has an average weight gain of 60-70 pounds, for example) to the deeper questions that make you question who you are, are real. Imagine if someone told you that there was a pill that would fundamentally change you as a person, supposedly for the better—would you take it? Or would you wonder what you were sacrificing, if that person you ended up as would still be you? It’s not as easy as it sounds. Taking an ibuprofen because you have a headache doesn’t change you as a person, it just makes you the same person without a headache. It’s when you start wanting to change the personality of someone that the ethical and philosophical questions start appearing: if we’re made up of our experiences, and bipolar fundamentally changes our perceptions of experiences, then doesn’t medicine change who we are on a level we can’t even begin to comprehend?

I’m not saying that I’m anti-medicine, or that I’m totally for it – each person is different and what works for one may not work for another, but I will always be reticent to accept “normality”, especially when it comes at such a high cost, without closely examining what it is we’re sacrificing. 

Still, I want to thank the prompter, whoever it was, for giving me something to work with and inspiring me to write something that challenged me, comforted me, and forced me to work through some of my own issues. I sincerely thank you for that. 

And on a final note, I know it took me nearly a year to finish - ! – so I am extra appreciative of all the people who stuck with this, left me such wonderful reviews, and generally made my days so much brighter. I looked forward to hearing your thoughts, cherished your feedback, and sincerely appreciate all those who take the time to leave a review. 

As always, I love getting feedback of all kinds, but constructive criticism makes me a better writer - and so if you have any to offer, I would love to hear it!

Thank you! ♥

Some excellent resources:

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison  
A Touch of Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison  
Welcome to the Jungle by Hilary T. Smith  
The Bipolar Handbook by Wes Burgess


End file.
